MariaDB Corporation, a vendor of open-source databases, has announced the upcoming release of its big data analytics engine, MariaDB ColumnStore, another significant milestone for the MariaDB open-source community. MariaDB ColumnStore will be available to beta test in May of 2016.

The release is the industry's first to enable transactional and massively parallelized analytic workloads under the same roof. This unification is possible because of MariaDB's extensible architecture that allows simultaneous use of purpose built storage engines for maximum performance, simplification and cost savings, an approach which stands apart from competitors like Oracle and obviates the need to buy and deploy traditional columnar database appliances.

MariaDB's business plan has been bolstered by a new equity investment from SmartFin Capital, which counts among its investors numerous major banks including ING. The injection, at a time where other tech investments have been delayed, provides an additional $3M, bringing the company's extended B round to $12M. The fresh funds further fuel the company's momentum in the financial and communications industries.

"I've seen first-hand how traditional columnar appliances arose as reactions to the cost and complexity of Oracle," commented Michael Howard, CEO of MariaDB. "But these reactions have only increased complexity and cost further, and most importantly, over-looked critical features. In contrast, MariaDB ColumnStore is ACID compliant, blazingly fast, massively parallelized and uses a distributed storage engine. What's equally important is its front end -- MariaDB, which provides the same interface, same security, same SQL richness simplifying management, reducing operating costs."

MariaDB ColumnStore is a columnar storage engine for massively parallel distributed query execution and data loading. It supports a vast spectrum of use cases including real-time, batch and algorithmic. It performs complex aggregation, joins and windowing functions at the data storage level to increase performance. MariaDB ColumnStore is Open-Source GPL2, a fork based on InfiniDB and open-source community contributions.

MariaDB is also announcing new data streaming capability in MariaDB MaxScale that will simplify real-time data propagation to external Data Lakes or Data Warehouses. The new feature allows transactions in MariaDB to be replicated in real time to Hadoop or any other data store. It enables MaxScale and MariaDB to be configured to handle replication in mission critical applications without impact on performance and, at the same time, include all necessary metadata so that any program can read it, with no per-value overhead.

Michael "Monty" Widenius, CTO of MariaDB, said: "Big data analytics is a priority for businesses that need to scale their analytics capabilities and extract greater value from growing data volumes. MariaDB ColumnStore and MariaDB MaxScale with data streaming provide a holistic approach to increasingly demanding analytical processing tasks. Our approach is aimed at any company who does not want to pay big for big data. For the MariaDB/MySQL community, MariaDB ColumnStore is the first complete data warehouse solution. We believe our engineering team and community have built a new generation database platform for the modern data-driven business."